August 27, 2015

EP: Naps - You Will Live in a Cool Box

Naps invites you into their cool box and you may never want to leave.

Although people talk shit about Florida, there’s clearly something musical in the water. Look no further for recent proof then Tallahassee’s Naps. On their debut EP, You Will Live in a Cool Box, Naps does everything they can to erase the barrier between listener and performer. Simultaneously warm and gloomy like the land they hail from, Naps rolls you into a fetal position while asking you to remember the pains of a lost love. The remembering is key. They rub salt in their wounds and remind you that there’s pleasure to be found in pain.
The “cool box” leaves you alone with your thoughts, unfettered from the societal rules of the real world.

On opener “Jean Skirt Mystique,” Ryan Stanley sings, “There’s no god between us / there’s no god anymore / and I just want something easy / I wanna make out with my friends.” Backed by bedroom guitars and snare taps, the listener finds themselves transported to the insular world that Naps’ makes so tangible. It’s okay in this solitary space to mix the high and the low, the religious and the familiar, the metaphysical and the tactile. It’s all relative to the struggling heart. By the time Naps gets to “Sandspurs” the EP’s penultimate track, the feeling of drowning is superseded by an angry resurface to air. It begins as a quiet ode to a past love, “I remember when you were sweet,” sings Katryn Macko, her voice thin against two papery guitars. Light harmonies follow but are only interrupted by a burst of noise and aasteady, heavy floor tom and snare beat. There’s another story at work here, not the nostalgia of when things were better but the recognition of hagiography. [In] “the last five years my ears kept ringing / you know your roar was deafening,” Katryn continues. The intuitive end to “when you were sweet,” is that you aren’t anymore, and the world outside of the cool box no longer exists. You Will Live in a Cool Box urges us to react, lest we lose ourselves in the past.

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You Will Live in a Cool Box by NapsListen to Naps onbandcamp.THIS STAFF POST WAS CONTRIBUTED BY:
Madeline Meyer, a Los Angeles transport to Philadelphia. She writes screenplays and plays guitar and sings in Littler. Her favorite things are olives, board games, and dad jokes.